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"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

To take nothing away from Chase Winovich as a player, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that a large part of our collective excitement at landing his commitment was the ecstasy of winning a[nother] head-to-head recruiting battle over Ohio State. Several tweets mentioned that Winovich is the seventh Michigan commit in the 2014 class who had an OSU offer.

This got me wondering how many OSU commits had Michigan offers, and whether we're stacking up as well against our other rivals and various national powers. So I did a little bit of checking around on 247 today. Chart? Chart. (Actually more of a table.)

Team X

Michigan Commits with Team X Offer

Aggregate Stars of M Commits with X Offer

Team X Commits with Michigan Offer

Aggregate Stars of X Commits with M Offer

Player Differential

Aggregate Star Differential

TEXAS

0

0

2

7

TEX +2

TEX +7

LSU

1

5

2

9

LSU +1

LSU +4

GEORGIA

1

4

1

4

0

0

ND

5

21

5

20

0

M +1

TENN

4

17

4

16

0

M +1

MIAMI(YTM)

2

7

1

5

M +1

M +2

VA TECH

2

8

1

4

M +1

M +4

PSU

2

9

1

4

M +1

M +5

OREGON

2

8

0

0

M +2

M +8

STANFORD

4

17

2

8

M +2

M +9

ALABAMA

4

17

1

5

M +3

M +12

FSU

3

12

0

0

M +3

M +12

NEBRASKA

3

12

0

0

M +3

M +12

OSU

7

28

4

16

M +3

M +12

WISCONSIN

4

16

1

4

M +3

M +12

USC

3

13

0

0

M +3

M +13

MSU

5

19

0

0

M +5

M +19

FLORIDA

5

21

0

0

M +5

M +21

(Stars are computed based on the 247 composite star rating. I may have missed recruits, so please feel free to let me know. Big Ten programs in italics.)

Of the programs I checked, only LSU and Texas are beating us in head-to-head recruiting for this cycle, but our overlapping targets are so few that I'm not sure we can really draw any generalized conclusions from that. With Da'shawn Hand and Malik McDowell still to drop, we have a good chance of winning the overall head-to-head against Les Miles at the end of the day. We'll probably "lose" the head-to-head against Texas, but as leftrare points out in the comments, that's largely the product of their Texas-centric recruiting.

As a general matter, the SEC is holding its own against us - obligatory caveat about small sample size for LSU and Georgia, but Tennessee and Alabama have had a lot of success poaching Midwestern recruits in recent cycles (see, e.g., Brian's front page post about this), and that trend appears to be alive and well in this class.

Notre Dame is also basically at parity with us, while we're pretty convincingly prevailing over Ohio State at this juncture. As always, lol sparty.

Winning head-to-head recruiting battles is important, obviously, because offers are often better indicators of future performance than star ratings. But they're also important as a means of deflecting the constant refrains of "recruiting doesn't matter, stars don't show up on the field," etc. The one aspect of recruiting that no reasonable fan can deny is that you want your program to land its first-choice talent and not have to settle for Plan B, C, or D. So far, Hoke & Co. have done an exceptional job of standing toe-to-toe with our rivals and nationally elite programs, and they've won significantly more battles than they've lost.

Yes, it does show that when we cultivate a recruit and there is mutual interest, some SEC team can't just come along and take away our candy just by showing up. We're not the loser in a bar that buys a girl drinks all night and then has the drummer in the band steal her away at closing time.

We always knew that we could not show up at the 11th hour and steal Alabama's or LSU's or Florida's prized recruits, but I'm not sure we realized that they can't steal ours either.

Yes and no. True, the battles tend to be more one-sided than truly head-to-head for recruits, but even during the down years they did pull in some kids that UM wanted. I know the narrative is that the only good players MSU gets are those UM doesn't want, but I definitely remember kids with offers from both schools choosing MSU. But honestly, the past couple of years have been as dominating as I can imagine when it comes to recruiting. My guess is that it will swing back a bit, but MSU is in trouble if they can't pry a couple of good kids from A2 every year. Ohio isn't a fun place to recruit right now either, so they need some local kids to pay off.

Not sure how Jalyn Powell even enters this discussion, since he had offers from MSU and no one else.

Reschke was an MSU legacy, but I do think the coaching staff sort of botched that one. Given his relationship with Morris, it could've at least been competitive if we had been working him from day 1. Instead, he got the offer almost as an afterthought (I can't find a link, but I know a lot of speculation at the time was that we offered Reschke to maintain our relationship with the coaching staff at Brother Rice).

Burbridge and, to a lesser extent, Madaris certainly hurt in 2012, but isn't that just illustrative of how far Hoke's recruiting has come in the last two years? Assuming that Burbridge freely chose MSU and wasn't academically subpar for UM (huge assumption not backed up by history), can anyone seriously envision that recruitment turning out the same way in 2014 or 2015?

FWIW, Finley wasn't actually offered. Michigan called him and asked if he had any interest in possibly setting up a visit; he said no. The recruiting sites ran with that info as "Michigan offers Finley, Finley sticks with MSU."

Was Dr. Hamlet III included in our lol sparty numbers? Because depending on whose metric we used that'd be another +3-5 stars over MSU. The real reason I bring this up is because I don't like sparty not being last on the list... that just seems like the natural order of things.

We offered their 4 * CB Jermaine Roberts and 4* LB Otaro Alaka. They offered none of Michigan's commits. Texas "beats" Michigan, and probably every other team every year on this type of comparison for the simple fact that they rarely offer any kid not from Texas and they flat out own Texas. Net -2 players and -7 stars.

I really don't care. just share. Going forward, I will try to post updates to this thread -- if it stays up. The thing is, every time a Michigan offer makes a commitment somewhere else, the offending school needs to be updated. Likewise, every time Michigan gets a commit, the other offering schools need to be updated.

I don't know if the mods have ever allowed a "wiki" on a specific subject?

Paging Seth! This is the best content-driven diary entry I've read in awhile. It's informative, topical, easy to understand, and could easily stand next to recruiting class updates to provide deeper analysis of how Michigan is doing in comparison to her peers (In fact, it'd be awesome if that happened). Absolutely love this. I hereby nominate Coastal Elite for Dear Diary shoutout.

First of all, I'm honored you think I write well enough to even be compared to Coastal Elite. I've always really enjoyed his/her posts, and this one in particular was composed quite nicely. Sadly, I am not his/her MGoAlter-Ego...perhaps if I had Coastal Elite's insight I'd finally get to 100 points.

Secondly, my name is Pedot; it's Polish. I understand what my username looks like, but as I've told multiple users, that's not the intent of the username. In fact, the content of my posts are never debased, so quite frankly I don't care what you or others think about it.

Some simple fact checking is in order. Florida had at least 3 kids in the 2013 class alone with Michigan offers

Alex Anzalone, Alvin Bailey and Vernon Hargreaves III

You may want to use more than Scout.com to check offers. Whether you consider those head to head match up is debatable but it seems little disingenous not to include all kids if you're listing "team x commits with Michigan offer"